Why do I talk myself out of seeing miracles?
That's the question posed at the beginning of the new Elevation Worship song: More Than Able. Why DO I talk myself out of seeing miracles? As I've meditated on that song and those words this week, I've been confronted with the reality of just how frequently I do just that. Talk myself out of miracles. And for Christians, it's possible that not believing in miracles may rank up there with not loving God and each other as the most un-Christian thing we can do. If you are a Christian, you believe we were created from dirt. You believe Christ died and then rose from the dead. You believe Christ ascended into heaven and yet at the very same time stayed behind to live within us as our greatest source of life. That's just a few of the miracles that are the foundation of the Christian belief. I'm not saying everyone believes that. I'm not even here to talk anyone into believing it. I am here to say that if you do believe it - like I do - then it makes it a bit absurd - counter-Christian - to talk myself out of miracles. I suppose I do it because I begin to doubt what God CAN do more than I believe in what he's already done. I suppose I do it because I begin to feel such a sense of urgency about the miracle I want in my life right now that I quit standing on the confidence of the miracles God's already done. And been doing all along. When I sit here and reflect this morning on just one single truth about my life: I. Am. Here. My life begins to scream out "More Than Able." When I think of all the times I just knew I wasn't able to go on, and didn't want to yet somehow did - I think of miracle worker. You may not get this, but I do: someone rising from the dead isn't so unfathomable to a man who many days feels like he himself has risen from the dead. The greatest miracle known to man loses its mystique when you feel like you yourself are the greatest miracle known to man. So why do I talk myself out of seeing miracles? Increasingly, I do not. Increasingly, I am reminded as the words in the song say: You are more than able. Who am I to deny what the Lord can do? There are days, I confess, when I do still deny. But sitting here writing this morning I know I'm the last man on earth who SHOULD deny. Now I see all that I have And I've got my confidence back I'll put my trust in the one who still does miracles You do miracles Sometimes when we're doubting the miracle worker, it's because we're looking ahead and we don't see the miracle coming our way. Maybe do what I've done this morning. Look behind. Look behind and see the one who is more than able. Maybe the miracle you're looking for has already taken place.
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How about you? Do you spend more time worshipping your strengths or your weaknesses?
Maybe my greatest weakness IS the amount of time I spend worshipping my weaknesses. Have you ever thought about that? Because I am this morning. I'm thinking about this truth that we all have strengths. The fact that we choose to focus on or lean into or wrestle with our weaknesses does not mean we have more weaknesses than strengths. It means we spend more time worshipping them than our strengths. I think about my writing. I know I'm a better writer than I was ten years ago. That's not because I suddenly found a writing strength. It's because I made a commitment to spend more time writing every day than I did telling myself I have no business writing. I told someone yesterday that I admire the discipline they have eating so healthy. I said I wish I had that kind of discipline when it comes to nutrition. I'm thinking this morning I should have said that different. I think I should have said I wish I'd quit worshipping my weakness when it comes to food and start embracing the strength I already have in me to make the kind of choices that I really want to make. Because just because I say I don't have the power to make better choices doesn't make it so. It just means I'm worshipping my weakness and not my strength. How much stronger would we all be if we turned our heads toward our strengths and away from our weaknesses. How much closer would we be to living out our potential if we leaned on our strengths all the way there instead of worshipping our weaknesses while staying right where we are? I challenge you today. What weakness do you have in your life that is only a weakness because you worship it? You worship it instead of embracing the strength that would make that weakness a distant memory. A dead toxic thought pattern. You have strength in you. We all do. It's our common gift. Just because you choose to worship your weaknesses doesn't make it untrue. I encourage you today, worship your strength. You'll be surprised the places you'll go. Life is better these days. Which is a bit puzzling, really. Because life isn't much different these days.
In many ways this better life looks a lot like the miserable life of a few years ago. And a few decades ago. Yes, in many ways life isn't different, but what I pay attention to these days is drastically different. I'm coming to know that as a secret of life. As a truth of life. Much of life we can't undo. Much of life we can't control. But every day - every second - I am in complete control of which pieces of life I pay attention to. I've spent much of my life paying attention to what I'd lost. Sometimes I was aware of that. Other times it was something happening behind the scenes of my life. Today when I feel myself going there - because I do still go there - I stop myself. Because when you are more aware of the direction something is going you have more power to yell stop. No. Stand in front of it and say don't you dare go there. You can not only stop the direction, but you can reverse it. Reverse it and pay attention to the two beautiful boys I still have. Pay attention to the incredible jobs I get to do. Pay attention to the ability I still have to get up and move, even if slower and more fragile. Pay attention to the passions I still have, like writing. Pay attention to the friends who keep pointing me in the direction of all I still have. Maybe you don't have the capacity to make life different today, but you absolutely have the capacity to choose which parts of life you pay attention to. I encourage you to pay attention to what you still have. It may not make life different, but it can sure make it better. Take it from me, there is nothing wrong with better. There are a lot of good habits. I'm sure many people would suggest saying I love you is one of them.
I'm no longer sure of that. I don't want to talk people out of telling people they love them. I've just been thinking a lot about what it means for ME to tell people I love them. Because 'I love you' CAN become a habit. It can become words that spill from our mouths at habitual times. Before leaving for work. When coming home from work. Maybe after a kiss good night. Maybe its the way we end a text to a friend. Or to our kids. When I drop my boys off on Sundays and they get out of the car, I tell them I love them. They say I love you too. And I feel something deeply emotional in that. Every time. And I've thought about that. Because I haven't always felt something emotional when exchanging those words in my life. Rarely, actually. It's often felt more like exchanging - well, words - and not emotions. Emotions travel with you. They are the great transporter of the meaning and the depth of each others words. Without emotions you carry away just words. Words that get lost among words. I suppose one could suggest I feel something with my kids because they ARE my kids. Maybe. But I would argue back it's because I'm emotionally connected to my kids. More than with anyone else, I'm connected to them - so I think it makes sense that their I love yous feel different. They don't have a different meaning - maybe, but they have a different feeling. We can begin to let the words I love you become a replacement for the work of I love you. Saying I love you doesn't connect us; doing what I love you looks like does. There's a danger in I love you beginning to sound like every other word in our language. There's a danger in it beginning to feel that way. It can begin to go in one ear and out the other like so many other words. And that's a tragedy. Because I think more than any other words accessible to us, I love you was meant to go straight to the heart. And stay there. Live there where humans are connected. Fuel. I love you is designed, I think, to be the best description ever of a loving connection. I wonder more and more, though, if we are skipping the connection and going right to the description. Trying to give words the power that only the connection is designed to convey. It's possible I love you now has too many definitions. The words a source of confusion far more than a source of comfort. And healing. I don't know. I've clearly thought about it a lot. And I've only concluded this: For me going forward, when I say I love you I want my words to describe the connection I have with someone. I want it to be the best description ever. And, I would like to feel that way when I hear those words. Kind of like I feel when those boys close the doors to the car and begin to walk away, but before they do, they say: I love you. I love you, the connection we have. Not the words we say. There's an anxiousness that comes with I'm in it alone. When we're anxious, it's hard to learn. It's hard to observe the world around us with any depth. Any search for meaning.
It's hard to gather wisdom. Sometimes I'm awed by the wisdom I've gained the last several years. Not in a bragging sort of way, but more from a place of gratitude. Gratitude to God and gratitude to many of you. Writing has been my way of making sure I'm never alone with what's banging around in my head. It's not a venting or an offloading as much as it is a sweet release. I think that's what relationships are supposed to be. A sweet release. I've not had that in relationships. Some of that is my own doing; some of it is not. I'm a work in progress. But I do know it's possible to be in a relationship and yet within it be in a place where you're alone with what's banging around in your head. In that situation, I think a suffocating mind is more brutal to endure than a suffocating lung. They both leave you fighting for life. It's a suffocating mind, though, that can drag that fight out for decades. But when you get this chance to share what is weighing on you, what you've been carrying, what fears you have about the next day - or the next second. When you get the chance to share out, you open the door for the world to share back in. You create a pathway. A both ways. When you have a chance to sweet release all that torments you, you suddenly have the chance to hold more of what lifts you. You make room for it. You invite it. And it's not simply about the release. In fact it's not that at all. It's all about the reminder that I am not alone with this. I am not alone with what is banging around inside my head. Maybe ask someone today, hey - what do you have banging around inside your head? You can ask it playful and light; I guess that question could come across creepy. But ask it with unmistaken curiosity. Ask it with unmistaken invitation. And safety. There are a lot of suffocating minds out there looking for sweet release. Maybe you are that sweet release. Maybe you are a source of life. 3/23/2023 0 Comments Our traumas are catching up to us"Feeling the need to be busy all the time is a trauma response and fear-based distraction from what you'd be forced to acknowledge and feel if you slowed down."
A friend shared that quote on her social media yesterday. Then, last night, I ran into another friend whom I deeply admire. He told me about a conversation he'd had with someone about being a workaholic. My friend owns that he may have some workaholism in him. The conversation he had with his friend got him to thinking about the possibility that the need to be constantly working is a pathway to escaping the past. And then I got to thinking. A lot. My friend is very successful at what he does. Because he is, you'd never think for a second that his success might be partially or largely or even entirely driven by his unwillingness to go anywhere near his past. It got me to wondering. How much of this frenetically paced world, this mad dash for the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, is actually a stampede away from the collective storms of our pasts? How much 'driven' is actually 'hiding'? How many trophies, how many big houses, how many promotions aren't achievements, but actually distractions? If I can make this moment big enough it will somehow shrink the moments of my past. I had a friend send me a text the other night. The message said I know you will fall asleep shortly only to wake up an hour later wondering what you missed out on in the hour you slept! This friend knows I'm not a great sleeper. I haven't been for decades. And I always did think it was because I was afraid of what I'd miss out on if I was sleeping. When I'm awake I'm moving. I'm creating. I'm contributing. I'm observing. I am staying busy. But when I woke up for the first time last night, I found myself wondering if this is not because I'm anxious to get up, but instead a fear of the stillness of being asleep. Many see sleep as an escape from the fast pace of life. I wonder if some of us feel like sleep holds us captive away from the fast pace that often offers us our greatest source of peace? I'm not suggesting that all sleep troubles are rooted in the traumas of our past. I'm not suggesting that all hard working and accomplished people are running from the traumas of our past. I am suggesting this - that far more of what we do and see and interact with IS a dance around and away from the traumas of our past. I AM suggesting that as we find more and more ways to outrun our traumas - hide from them - we are missing the reality that our traumas are not so slowly catching up with us. They are catching up with us as individuals; they are catching up with us as a society. Every measure of the current mental health crisis points to this reality. And yet the stillness we've been running from is the stillness we so desperately need. We need the sleep we are hiding from; we need time to comfort the shared pains we are running from. We need to collectively stop. And turn around. And wave our white flags of surrender at our shared traumas. And together fight them. Not with violence, but with shared compassion and acceptance and understanding. I can feel that white flag moment. I can feel the world tap it's brakes. The spinning globe screeching to a crawl. The dust of the stamped settling. I can feel it, and it feels like peace. I can feel it. It feels like sleep. 3/20/2023 0 Comments Have your ship and your anchor tooYesterday I wrote, "many relationships fail because people don't know what it looks like to be anchors for one another. They climb into the boat of a relationship without considering there will come a day when they may have to go to the bottom of the ocean just to keep their ship afloat."
I went on to say, "it's then and there when they often discover they have no idea how to be an anchor, or that they have no desire to be an anchor that has to go that deep." If that sounds like it was coming from a voice of experience - it was. Both my own personal relationships experience and the relationship stories I've heard from countless other people in recent years. When I suggest that people have no idea how to be an anchor with someone else, I believe that's because people have never figured out how to be an anchor for themselves. You can't do with others what you've never done for yourself. You can't help someone else face battles in life if you've never figured out how to face your own. You can't help someone else regulate their jacked up stress response system if you've never figured out how to regulate your own. You can't offer someone else grace and understanding if you've never offered those things to yourself. You can't tell someone else you believe in them if you've never believed in you. Many of us have never figured out how to go deep with ourselves because we've never been brave enough to go there. Trust me, I get that. Our deepest stuff is deep for a reason. We shoved it there. Out of sight and out of mind. If I shove it deep enough maybe it will go away. Maybe it will never have happened. That's what we come to believe. Maybe the main reason we refuse to go deep with others is out of a fear they in turn may want to look deeper into me. It scares us to death that someone may locate all of our hiding places. They will unhide things I've masterfully spent a lifetime hiding. They will uncover the lies I've thoroughly convinced myself are truths. Maybe it's cruel, but that IS the point of being each others anchors. The point IS the unhiding. Secrets ARE the storms of a relationship, the unhiding is often the most durable part of the anchor. It starts with me, though. It starts with us. When we quit hiding things from ourselves we live in far less fear of someone else discovering those things. When we quit hiding things from ourselves, we learn to navigate the stress and the pain that have long accompanied those things - no matter how deep we had them buried. We learn to forgive ourselves. To offer ourselves grace. And to believe in the path going forward. A path that will more than likely present us the chance to be an anchor, an anchor for ourselves and an anchor for someone else. Maybe many others. Only this time we will know how to do that; we will be willing to do that. We will have our ship and anchor too. And maybe that won't keep those relationships from being rocky, but it will keep them from sinking. She held up her anchor. She asked us to focus on the ocean she'd drawn at the bottom of it. She said, I drew an ocean because I want my person to know I'll go deep with them. No matter how choppy or rough things get, I'm going to keep going deep with them through all the hard stuff.
All the way to the bottom of the ocean if I have to. I took part in a teen summit yesterday. During the summit, my friend and colleague Marrin led teens through an activity that asked them to explore how they anchor themselves, and what makes them a good anchor for one another. She handed each of the teens a blank paper anchor. Then, she asked them to draw or write or be creative with the anchor in a way that would help them tell the story about what it means for them personally to be an anchor for someone. I won't soon forget what I felt when that young high school senior pointed to her ocean and opened my eyes to what will forever now be my definition of an anchor. The willingness to go deep. Forever I have viewed the anchor as something you simply toss over the side of the boat to steady that boat. I suppose it is, but that grossly underappreciates the story of all an anchor might have to go through before it finds the bottom of the lake. Or ocean. I couldn't help but think about how many relationships fail because people don't know what it looks like to be anchors for one another. They climb into the boat of a relationship without considering there will come a day when they may have to go to the bottom of the ocean just to keep their ship afloat. It's then and there when they often discover they have no idea how to be an anchor, or that they have no desire to be an anchor that has to go that deep. I signed up to ride the ship; not be the ship's anchor. Meaningful relationships rely on good anchors, not good ships. The best of ships will always be in trouble in stormy waters without an anchor. The best of anchors will always steady a ship no matter how stormy the waters get. I can't deny this teen had me reflecting on the stormy relationships of my own life. But this same teen gave me a kind of hope for our teens I haven't experienced in a while. The storms of our teens lives are giant right now. Giant and relentless. But yesterday, I listened to teens talk with great insight and great clarity and great confidence about what it means to be anchors for one another. I'm not sure us adults always know how to be anchors for our teens, but teens have a pretty good idea how to do that. They have a long way to go, for sure. But maybe not as far as I have to go, and I find that promising. For them, and thanks to one particular teen, for me as well. If you're a basketball fan, you now know that the maddest of all March Madness upsets took place last night.
Fairleigh Dickinson beat Purdue. Most analysts are calling it the greatest March Madness upset ever, if not the greatest college basketball upset ever. One ranking system had Fairleigh Dickenson ranked as the 298th best team in the country yesterday; that same system had Purdue in the top 5. Fairleigh Dickenson won only 4 games all of last year; they lost a whopping 15 this year 😮. They didn't win their conference OR their conference tournament - the worst ranked conference in the country by the way - and they were only eligible for the tournament because the team that did win the conference WASN'T eligible for the tournament. It's quite possible Fairleigh Dickenson is the worst team to ever walk on to the dance floor of March Madness. And here's the other thing - maybe the BIGGEST thing - in a game that relies so heavily on size, Fairleigh Dickenson is the shortest team in division one basketball. Surely they were TOO small to even think about matching up with Zach Edey, Purdue's 7 foot 4 inch superstar - the tallest player in Big Ten Conference history - and the player most experts regard as the best basketball player in America. You know Fairleigh Dickenson heard it for days leading up to the tournament. Your TOO small. Your TOO outclassed. Your TOO undeserving to even be here!! Who knows how many TOOs they endured leading up to the game. But here's how many TOOs they chose to believe: ZERO.... Their coach told them he'd watched Purdue play and he believed they could win the game. So instead of listening to the TOO's, Fairleigh Dickenson chose to listen to their coach. Because they did, a team many thought could win the championship is going home, and the shortest team in America is still fighting for college basketball's biggest prize. It has me wondering this morning, how many TOOs do I listen to? How many do YOU listen to? Your TOO old. Your TOO inexperienced. Your TOO slow. Your TOO poor. How many TOOs are standing in your way of taking down what the world around you is calling impossible? The TOOs standing in your way are the TOOs you choose to believe. It's a fact; every TOO you believe becomes a truth in your life. TOO is an opinion until you believe it and make it a fact. If you believe you're too old, you are. If you believe you're too slow, you are. Fairleigh Dickenson didn't believe one single TOO about themselves. And so they march on, in one of the greatest March Madness underdog stories ever. Only I'm not sure Fairleigh Dickenson is buying this whole underdog story; they are TOO busy winning to believe in it. 3/17/2023 0 Comments Why is this happening for me?I had coffee with a friend yesterday who has recently endured a lot of challenges and rejection. Nothing makes us begin questioning our paths and ourselves like rejection.
She's a wise friend. She told me, I just can't allow myself to start asking myself 'why is this happening to me?' In hearing her say those words a response quietly came to mind. I think far more for me than for her. And that response was: Why is this happening for me? I think sometimes it's more helpful to ask ourselves 'why is this happening FOR me' than it is to ask ourselves 'why is this happening TO me.' That simple shift turns an event that victimizes into an event that fertilizes. Trust me, understanding the concept of that shift is much easier than MAKING that shift. Our natural instinct is to look at rejection and say f-you not thank you. I've also come to understand, at least in my own life, that our natural instincts don't always have our best interests in mind. I'm afraid mine rarely do. They are often at odds with my wisdom. Wisdom from within and wisdom from without. But it is wisdom that allows me to look to the past, look to the countless things that happened to me and see that in more ways than I could have imagined - those things were not happening to me; they were happening for me. They were happening without my fully knowing - or accepting - that the challenges of my yesterday ARE the source of wisdom for my today. It's odd, isn't it, how wisdom, one of the most beautiful gifts life can offer, lives within us in such anonymity? It never knocks. It never announces itself. And even when it's living well within our grasp, it often demands that we come looking for it. It always refuses to do battle with our natural instincts, but when called upon, it never refuses to stand by our side. It never refuses to echo with strength and confidence when we ask the question, why is this happening for me? It never leaves our side when we move ahead in the face of challenges and rejection committed to finding that answer. Because I for one do believe the answer to that question will always be found. One day. Some way. It will always be found. Why is this happening for me? |
Robert "Keith" CartwrightI am a friend of God, a dad, a runner who never wins, but is always searching for beauty in the race. Archives
February 2025
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